Tuesday, November 06, 2012

Cloud Atlas

CLOUD ATLAS (Lana Wachowski, Tom Tykwer, and Andy Wachowski, 2012)CLOUD
ATLAS plays connect the dots across the years in six concurrent stories
with the same primary actors playing multiple roles over the different
periods. Lawyer Adam Ewing (Jim Sturgess) sees firsthand the horrors of
slavery in the South Pacific islands in 1849. In his diary, later to
be published, he writes about this and his rapidly declining health on
the voyage home. Robert Frobisher (Ben Whishaw) is reading it in 1936
as he works and stays with a famous composer in Cambridge, England. On
the side Frobisher writes “The Cloud Atlas Sextet”, which is largely
unremembered yet sought out by Luisa Rey (Halle Berry), a reporter
investigating a possible cover-up at a nuclear power plant in San
Francisco in 1973. Luisa’s
story is one that crosses the path of London book publisher Timothy
Cavendish (Jim Broadbent) in 2012. He writes about his own experiences
hiding out from a client’s thugs and has it turned into a film, part of
which is seen in 2144 Neo Seoul, Korea by server clone Sonmi-451 (Doona
Bae). Her inspirational words are passed down through an unspecified
number of years and elevate her to god-like status among the primitives
like Zachry (Tom Hanks). The
scope and ambition in CLOUD ATLAS are so enormous that the three
writer/directors--Lana Wachowski, Tom Tykwer, and Andy Wachowski--and
editor Alexander Berner don’t so much as tame novelist David Mitchell’s
unruly tangle of loosely linked plots across centuries but make it
presentable and even coherent. Berner’s editing is often nothing short
of remarkable in connecting these disparate pieces so that they seem
part of a whole. As an instructional in crosscutting, it’s quite an
achievement. CLOUD
ATLAS shouldn’t work. Sometimes it doesn’t. Prosthetics and makeup
are used to sell the transformations for those in the main cast who
switch genders and races from story to story. Often the actors look
ridiculous. The pidgin English that passes for the future language of a
post-apocalyptic tribe can sound silly. The shifts in tone from one
storytelling style to another can be jarring and incompatible.Yet
CLOUD ATLAS proves to be worthy of wrestling with its
big philosophical ideas, including the seemingly misguided ones, and
engaging with a consistent vision of fluidity among the ages and eternal
truths. For such a sprawling endeavor, CLOUD ATLAS reduces to some
basic points. At heart are the beliefs that individual voices can make a
difference across time, if not in their own, and that love is
ultimately what endures. CLOUD ATLAS is prone to sappiness and
threatens to disappear up its own tail like THE MATRIX trilogy, but it
builds to an irresistible final act celebrating the human spirit. Grade: B-